Kit White: Walls and Occupied Spaces

Opening Reception:

Press Release: Kit White: Walls and Occupied Spaces

FreedmanArt is very pleased to present Walls and Occupied Spaces, new paintings by Kit White, opening April 16, 2019.

The spaces in these paintings exist as metaphorical landscapes occupied by linear constructions derived from both the organic and inorganic

Kit White’s new work incorporates photographic images into his paintings as poignant backdrops to abstract lines. The photograph provides a material, worldly context for the drawing, which is abstract in nature and represents the real.

This new series of works seek out images of land that have been scarred by conflict. Initially, the images were of contested spaces of what we have traditionally referred to as the Middle East, places where competing claims to land have led to warlike confrontations. But confrontations of all kinds, violent and non-violent, surround us and announce themselves through walls, barriers, and borders,not always physical, which symbolize the fraught politics of occupation, actual and symbolic. The artist found himself drawn to the photographs of Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) of the Civil War, thinking about the wall born of that conflict, a psychological division that continues to separate us.

Kit White Artist Statement: Walls and Occupied Spaces

March, 2019

Over the years, I have approached the space of my paintings as metaphorical landscapes. They have horizons and are occupied by linear elements that act as surrogates for structures both organic and inorganic. But because paintings are wholly created spaces, the parameters by which they are judged are formal in nature. All content reaches the viewer through a formal lens. Yet, it is the other lens, the photographic lens, through which we now receive most of our knowledge of the world and contextualizes most of what we know of it.